The Daily Egg

BRAD STORMS OUT: ANGIE TAKES THE KIDS September 28, 2009

The world is a complex and multidimensional place. “Large and varied enough to support vastly different ideas about what is going on behind the literal, visable surface of things,” Mr. Pitt told reporters yesterday, as he was returning home from a shoot on his latest film project (yet to be disclosed).

Elaborating on his statement, which was met with frowns and sour looks, Mr. Pitt stated that he was tired of trafficking in banality, but that he didn’t want to equate banality with entertainment, necessarily.

“The source of a great deal of my pain can be traced to the sensationalistic application of basic photo-journalism—I’ll cop to that,” he said. “And I recognize the utter dominance of desire marketing, and all the socio-graphical consequences therein. But that doens’t necessarily mean I can’t see the woods for the trees.”

Smiling as he spoke, holding up a small toy donkey he said he had just purchased for his daughter, Shiloh, 4, Mr. Pitt was variously amused, concerned, accommodating, ponderous, and in the opinion of those gathered, oddly contented. He held the donkey by the ears, the tail, the cranium, before cradling it in his arms—which he did to satisfy photographers requests.

While the paparazzi snapped away, Mr. Pitt performed patiently at the behest of those present (and to those beyond, it could be said—the vast multitudes of starving fans who wish to consume his every image), striking a number of characteristic poses—boyish, impish, concerned and informed—along the way.

But he demurred comment when asked abut his recent marital strife.

“What we all share, I think, is an ongoing attempt to justify our sense that the causes we perceive as ‘real’ and ‘correct’ are the ones that are indeed the most accurate and complete explanations of things,” he said.

Mr. Pitt, known for the youthful good looks and boyish charm that have made him one of the biggest stars on the planet, paused for a moment as he looked up into the sun. “The interesting thing going on here,” Mr. Pitt said, “is the conspicuous absence” of what he considers to be a rare force in today’s media landscape—honesty.

“And to always keep learning new things.” Both were, he mused, seen as “geeky” and “uncool” while in fact just the opposite was true.

“Nothing is more exciting than searching for the truth,” he said.

“Our culture at the current moment is predominantly a culture of sensationalistic entertainment, privileging gesture politics and ‘the spectacular'” above other “more nuanced and resonate modes.”

Mr. Pitt elaborated by saying that he believes “most human beings” have inside themselves “an awareness of the existence” of competing claims—”the sense that their beliefs co-exist with other beliefs”—and that the power different master-narratives present is the way they “exert upon the awakened attention a feeling or intuition that their lone particular consciousness” has stumbled into the presence of “what feels like an immortal current”—linking one claim to the next “throughout all of history.”

“In other words, the feeling that a plurality is coming into a domain of recognition that is dominated by a singularity,” Mr. Pitt clarified.

“And yet, it’s almost as if no matter what you believe, if you’re a Christian or a Jew or a Buddhist or a Hindu or Islamic or any of the subdivisions there within, your thinking contains within in it token evidence for the falsity of other claims.”

Mr. Pitt, 45, citied this an the source of great sorrow and confusion in the world.

Meanwhile, when reached for comment about the what the motivating factor behind their latest marital clash was, Ms. Jolie, facing the cameras immediately upon disembarking from her limousine, said that, “We all have different ideological settings for our theories of cause and effect. Even Mr. Pitt and I relate to each other through slightly differing symbolic vocabularies—our metaphorical webs overlap, but neither encompasses the other entirely.”

“That both explains and evades the question of our current relationship,” she said.

Ms. Jolie, dressed in a pinstripe Armani sport suit and carrying an gargantuan Hermes handbag, gave the crowd a treat when she thrust a leg forward and commenced vogue-ing. “There it is.” Her voice as she spoke was exhibiting a striking flutelike fluidity even as her smile sank into an aggressively formulated frown she conspicuously directed toward certain photographers. “Now you have your quota,” she said.

She then wondered aloud how efficacious it was, in terms of maintaining a responsible level of public discourse, for the media to continually represent things at their most simplistic level. “Just in order to sell merchandise—and to promote adoration of the rich.”

Which at the end of the day, she said, “Amounted to the same thing.”

“At some point you begin to wonder When does it stop? When will we ever grow up and take responsibility for the planet we are abusing?”

When asked if she felt the current policies were in service of doing harm or good for the environment, Ms. Jolie struck a confrontational note.

“Do you want a good movie or a bad movie—it’s that simple,” she said.

That there is one explanation behind it all—one all-potent singularity exerting a steady surreptitiously guiding force upon humanity—is the emotional assumption behind many of the arguments implicit in these statements and/or world-views. But the difficulty of assuming legitimacy of such a claim is compounded by the possibility that in some ultimate sense we are perhaps incapable of perceiving and/or understanding exactly what that one over-ridingly true explanation out there is—because experience as it is lived is mixed. And we know how interpretation—and its handmaiden, rhetorical allure—can be rigged for social/political advantage.

“Because even more than being fairly treated vis-a-vis the distribution of wealth and the inadequacies of real political representation, people now seem to crave above all else material vehicles for self-expression, developing in the process ersatz relationships with celebrities like myself and my husband, whose lives they get involved with to an extent much greater than they do with things like political fairness and social equality.”

Mr. Pitt, meanwhile, far away on the opposite coast, was busy making statements in a similar vein. When asked, for instance, which ideology he personally subscribed to—if he was a communist or a socialist or a “theosophist”—Mr. Pitt demurred at first, before saying, in the characteristicly disarming way that has endeared him to millions of movie-goers worldwide, “For me the simple truth is that no one really knows the Truth. It’s easier to speak about what is false.”

With that, Mr. Pitt smiled, waved his hand, and took leave of the gathering.

Before disappearing into a customized soundproofed BMW 750i Mr. Pitt was seen whispering into the ear of one of his handlers. It was impossible to ascertain precisely what words spoken by Mr. Pitt during this exchange were but talk among the reporters afterward seemed to indicate that Mr. Pitt was positing the existence of a mulit-mutual truth, one that accommodated itself to the presence of a chaotic process of signification that worked along apparently fractal-like mathematical progressions, each system forever branching off into a chaotically coherent infinity whose exact pattern could never be predicted with 100-percent accuracy, even though accurate simulations of the process were generally available to those designing the programs projecting the progressions.

And so it would seem the message is that the way we approach our assumptions—our sense of ultimate causation—goes a good way in determining the relative peace or violence of those situational outcomes we precipitate by our actions.

While flying over the Pacific on her way to an undisclosed private hideaway on the island of Maui, Mr. Jolie—whose own interview with the press was cut short by a “family emergency”— sent the following text message to the press:

“Too few people have the moral courage to transcend their own parochialism,” it read. “And the abutment therein, of the heart-felt side of man, redounds endlessly with a continuance of the world’s pain.”

“And perhaps,” the remainder of Ms. Jolie’s message stated, “that’s why Keats referred to the world as a “vale of Soul-Making.”

By this time the majority of reporters had dispersed and gone their separate ways. All except one had long since departed for their next assignment.

For reasons unknown as of this report, a lone unnamed photographer remained on site to document the tarmac’s peculiarly spectral—yet somehow avid—emptiness.